Digital still cameras (DSCs) are rapidly gaining popularity with consumers. They permit high resolution color images to be stored for subsequent printing by conventional ink jet and laser printers. The quality of the color prints that are produced approaches that of conventional silver halide photographic prints. More importantly, the digital images can be permanently stored on different forms of media such as compact disks (CDs), manipulated and altered in a personal computer (PC), inserted into computer graphics and word processing programs, sent to friends and relatives via e-mail, and transmitted over the Internet as part of web pages. From an environmental standpoint digital still cameras are attractive because they eliminate the need for chemical developer solutions.
Commercially available digital still cameras typically have a removable data storage media such as floppy diskette or a flash memory card onto which the digital representation of the images captured by the camera optics and charge coupled device (CCD) can be stored. These forms of media may be removed and plugged into a personal computer so that the digital representations of the images may be viewed. The personal computers may be provided with digital still camera image processing software for enhancing the color balance, contrast, borders and other characteristics of the images prior to storage, printing or transmission. Typically the image processing software that runs on the personal computer allows certain images to be selected and others discarded or ignored.
Other digital still cameras have been developed that may be coupled directly to a printer. These cameras are desirable for consumers who do not own personal computers or feel uncomfortable using such computers. The command buttons and graphical user interface (GUI) menus on such a camera's liquid crystal display (LCD) are used in accordance with a pre-programmed protocol to select the images to be printed. This type of digital still camera image selection and printing system has the advantage of not requiring a personal computer. It is normally undesirable to print all images, because some are usually poor in quality, and printing all images results in wasted time, paper and ink or laser toner. However, the user is faced with a complex and bewildering set of commands for selecting, downloading and printing images. As an alternative, the printer itself can be provided with a user interface for selecting images from a digital still camera. However this is undesirable because the printer ends up having user-unfriendly interface software. With either approach for coupling a digital still camera directly to a printer, without a PC interface, it is very tedious and cumbersome to vary the characteristics of the selected images to be printed, such as size, brightness, cropping, etc. For the sake of simplicity, such characteristics, along with others, are generally referred to herein as something that will “enhance” the original image taken by the digital still camera.
Users frequently wish to process some of the digital images differently than from others of the digital images. For example, for most of the images he or she may wish to print a certain number of copies of a certain print size, but for a few images print a different number of copies or make different size prints. In addition, users may wish to perform different processing operations on different images. For example, he or she may wish to print certain images on the local printer, but send other images via e-mail or fax to someone in a different location, and store yet other images on a mass storage system for retrieval at a future time.
It would therefore be desirable to provide a system and method for allowing a user to easily specify, at one point in time, the image processing operations to be performed, and the image processing parameters to be used, for different ones of a set of digital images, without requiring complex, repetitive, or on-going user interactions with the processing system.